Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Naked Jen: "Last night I was out with some friends and one of them has been blogging on a site hosted by Scriptwriting Magazine. I guess their system and servers crashed and he lost his entire blog and all his posts. He's only been blogging since September, but still! Everything is gone!" 

Confirmed, Apple does not claim the term podcast.  

The University of North Carolina is looking for a professor to teach blogging in the J-school.  

Paul Boutin: How to fight with other bloggers. 

Al Jazeera: Kim to lose iPod privileges. 

I just joined eBay. I know, what took me so long. Anyway, I'm bidding on something, and want to be notified by SMS or IM, and thought I'd use Skype (eBay bought it for $2.6 billion) but it isn't an option. That's pretty amazing. You'd think the Skype guys would have some sway over there. You can use PayPal (another big eBay acquisition) to pay for what you buy. 

Phil Wolff: "Dave, the reason Skype doesn't offer Skype alerting is that Skype doesn't operate a web service or offer a 'naked Skype' client or a Skype server that can talk through the Skype P2P network." 

Speaking of eBay, I was wondering if The Wire character, Wee Bey, was named after eBay. He was kind of a nice guy, if you like mass murderers.  

Postscript: I bought a Cobalt Qube for $125 on eBay! 

Speaking of buying things, Edgeio just bought Adaptive Real Estate Services. You heard it here first!  

Guy Kawasaki: "You should become a venture capitalist after you've had the shiitake kicked out of you." 

Sal Taylor Kydd, the head of product for Yahoo TV thanks you for your feedback on the new site. In the meantime I switched to TV Guide, which compares favorably to the old Yahoo TV site. There's a lesson here, one that I learned in 1984, when I shipped a new product with less functionality than the one it replaced. Make sure that the new version is better than the old one, users do notice.  

John Furrier: "Saying that startups will burst when Google crashes is like saying that increase in interest rates will burst the housing bubble." 

Caroline McCarthy at News.com says that Mike Arrington could use a copy editor. I was thinking the other way, that TechCrunch has lost soemthing now that it's more than Arrington. There was a charm to TC when it was just MA sledding downhill at 80,000 MPH on the seat of his pants. 

Stock Market 101 

Yesterday's bit about Bubble Burst 2.0 got a lot of response, interestingly none of it from proponents of the bubble, i.e. analysts or investors who have a stake in perpetuating the bubble (note, I do myself, but I'm famous for shooting off my mouth even when it costs me money).

And it seems that some others who comment are missing something about the stock market. Stock prices absolutely do matter, when you're talking about bubbles, because that's what bubbles are made of. Yes, a stock price is a pure product of group-think, but the whole economy is a product of group-think. If people liked freezing their asses off, real estate in the Colorado Rockies would be more expensive than real estate on the ocean in Florida. Wait a minute. Okay, you see the humor, I hope.

When the bubble bursts, that which was valuable yesterday is worthless today. Or worth less (much). That's what bubbles are all about.

And yes indeed, non-public companies have P/E ratios. The price of the stock is the price at the last transaction. Whether it's public or not determines the liquidity of the stock and whether bloggers and reporters know the price and can kibitz about it.

But with all the regulation these days, at least in the US, you do eventually find out the price, after a company is purchased by a public company.